This specification relates to identifying augmentation queries and augmenting search operations.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of content items, e.g., video and/or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, news articles, and so on. Content items of particular interest to a user can be identified by a search engine in response to a user query. One example search engine is the Google search engine provided by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., U.S.A. The query can include one or more search terms or phrases, and the search engine can identify and, optionally, rank the content items based on the search terms or phrases in the query and present the content items to the user (e.g., in order according to the rank).
Often users provide queries that cause a search engine to return results that are not of interest to the users, or do not fully satisfy the users' need for information. Search engines may provide such results for a number of reasons, such as the query including terms having term weights that do not reflect the users' interest (e.g., in the case when a word in a query that is deemed most important by the users is attributed less weight by the search engine than other words in the query); the queries being a poor expression of the information needed; or the queries including misspelled words or unconventional terminology.